at will,
and every dancer was 'his own poet,' than which nothing can be more
salubrious and delightful.

Thus the dance and the revel swang and swayed through the silver halls
till the green lights began to glow with gold and scarlet and crimson,
burning into dawn. Then came a sudden noise, like thunder, crashing and
roaring through the silence of the sea. Queen Mab clapped her hands,
and, in one moment, the Sacred Isle had flitted back to its place, and
the music stopped, and the dancers vanished.

Then, as the island swiftly receded, came a monstrous wave, and no
wonder, which raised the surface of the sea to a level with the topmost
cliff of the Calling Place. Queen Mab, who had flown to a pine-tree
there, saw the salt water fall back down the steeps like a cataract,
and heard a voice say, 'The blooming reef has bolted.' Another voice
remarked something about 'submarine volcanic action.' These words came
from a level with her head, where the Queen saw, stranded in a huge
tree, a boat with a funnel that poured forth smoke, and with wheels
that still rapidly and automatically revolved in mid air. In fact, a
missionary steamer had been raised by the mighty tidal wave to the level
of the cliff. Then the sailors climbed into the trees, talking freely,
in a speech which Queen Mab knew for English, but not at all the English
she had been accustomed to hear. Also the sailors had among them men
with full, sleek, shining faces, wearing tall hats and long coats, and
carrying little books whose edges flashed in the sun. And Queen Mab did
not like the look of them. Then she heard the sailors and the men in
black coats making straight for the very pine-tree in which she was
sitting. So she fled into a myrtle-bush, and behold, the sailors chopped
every branch of the pine clean away, and changed the beautiful tree
into a bare pole. Then they brought out ropes, and a great piece of thin
cloth, white with red and blue cross marks on it, and they tugged it up,
and it floated from the top of the tree. Then the people from the ship
gathered round it, and sang songs, whereof one repeated,

'Rule Britannia!'

and the other contained the words,

'Every prospect pleases, And only Man is vile.'

Soon some specimens of vile Man, some of the human beings of Samoa, came
round, beautiful women dressed in feathers and leaves, carrying flowers
and fruit, which they offered to the men in black coats and white
neckties. But the men in black c